Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by T. Jack Thompson. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. xviii + 286pp. ISBN 978-0-8028-6524-3. $45.00.

Abstract

Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, by T. Jack Thompson. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. xviii + 286pp. ISBN 978-0-8028-6524-3. $45.00.Many people's impressions of missionary activity in Africa must have been based on photographs, postcards, and (in the twentieth century) documentary film. For those who have never visited mission stations on that continent, such images provided (and continue to provide) some notion of what they and their inhabitants (both missionaries and African adherents) must have been like. Such photographic 'windows' conveyed an apparent sense of the physical reality of such places, to some extent their surrounding exotic environments, as well as their energising ideology, as represented in the activities portrayed within. As Jack Thompson points out, the heyday of missionary activity in Africa coincided with the emergence and development of photography, in its various branches, as a medium. After a hesitant start, the two became inseparably intertwined, particularly after the technology of printing photographs was developed so that the phase of being converted into engravings and lithographs could be abandoned in favour of the more immediate dot matrix and other forms of reproduction. From that time onwards missionary magazines, books, postcards, as well as newspapers, could provide an extraordinary sense of immediacy by publishing images that appeared to represent the dramatic immediacy of 'reality'.Since missions and photography were so closely associated, it is perhaps surprising that this is the first full-length book on the subject, although there have been a number of articles in journals and chapters in other books, not to mention studies of the relationship between photography and imperialism, as for example in the work of James Ryan. But the scope for further study is almost limitless. As Thompson suggests, there must be hundreds of thousands of photographs in missionary and other archives, many of them still to be studied. As is perhaps inevitable, Thompson concentrated on a relatively narrow front in order to make some sense of the field. Moreover, this is not just a highly specialised study. It is instead a strongly contextualised one in which each group of photographs and related images is set into its historical relationships with people, events, and the development of modes of news gathering and dissemination as well as of propaganda and campaigns by pressure groups. Moreover, the author acknowledges throughout just how problematic photographs are, how distant they can be from some alleged 'reality', and how amenable they are to a whole range of analyses in the light of modern schools of thought. In particular he notes the extent to which missionary photographs were intended to convey a progressive, transformatory 'before and after' ideology.Thompson opens with a chapter on the origins of photography, a starting point particularly valuable for the general reader since the specialist will find much of what he writes familiar.He moves on to the celebrated competition between the artist and the photographer together with the ways in which they began to co-operate. He illustrates the former by examining the tensions between Thomas Baines the artist and Charles Livingstone (to a lesser extent John Kirk), both photographers on the Zambezi expedition of David Livingstone; and the latter by looking at the celebrated Disruption painting in which all the portraits of the seceding ministers from the Church of Scotland in 1843 and others associated with them were based on photographs taken for the purpose. …